Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @12:10PM
from the to-go-with-the-mandated-yellow-dots dept.

carusoj writes "Researchers at Princeton University and University College London say they can identify unique information, essentially like a fingerprint, from any blank sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner. The technique could be used to crack down on counterfeiting or even keep track of confidential documents. The researchers' paper on the finding is set to be presented at an IEEE security conference in Oakland, Calif., in May."Update: 03/10 22:43 GMT by T: J. Alex Halderman, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the study, writes with more: "My group has just put up a site about the work and a copy of the full paper, and we will probably add a video later tonight."

You must not have been arrested recently. I was picked up on an ancient traffic ticket about 4 years ago, and they used an optical scanner to take fingerprints, so there was no ink. Of course, the scanner tended to mess up a lot if your fingers were sweaty due to, say, just having been arrested, so getting fingerprinted was an ordeal in itself.

That being said, though, this article seems to be more about getting identifiable fingerprints OF a piece of paper, not getting a person's fingerprints FROM a piece of paper. I'm not sure I see the use case in this, since companies don't maintain fingerprint records of the paper they sell, and doing so would be impractical given how much paper is produced on a daily basis.

i think it is to see if you are who you say you are. they require exemptions if you have committed a felony or had a alcohol-related crime. but then again the government never needed a reason to try and build a database of fingerprints/DNA

I see a very cool use case: Scan every single item of paper money we produce. Generate a hash value that matches each unique bill. Use the US government's private key to sign the hash value, and print this signature on every bill as a bar-code, easily scanned by any scanner. Goodbye counterfeiters.

There was at least 1 episode a few years back on Law and Order... my guess is either SVU or CI.

In any case, they traced the paper down to the office it was printed on because of marks left by the printer by testing all of the printers within a certain building that employed a number of "persons of interest."

I don't recall if that episode focused on the spots left on purpose, or if it was dirty roller in the printer. But there may have been more episodes that focused on either that I didn't see.

See, I though the quotes meant to retrieve fingerprints, as in "Fingerprint the suspect" or "Fingerprint the car door". The tag on the RSS feed said 'Cheap Scanners Can "Fingerprint" Paper' and for a moment, I thought me and my Visioneer were off to a wonderful new career in forensics... Crap....

Professional counterfeiters won't be deterred by this. It'll only catch the teenagers that try to print twenty dollar bills to pay for their school lunches. Much like how Photoshop won't edit files with a certain shade of green, or how ink jet printers embed a unique identifier in the yellow ink output. *shrug* It's amusing that most counterfeit money comes from Iran from a pair of printing presses that are identical to the ones used here in the United States, yet there's all this effort on trying to curb production from Joe Average. Most real threats come from sophisticated operations like that, and require a team to combat. This is nothing more than a novelty.

It's amusing that most counterfeit money comes from Iran from a pair of printing presses that are identical to the ones used here in the United States, yet there's all this effort on trying to curb production from Joe Average.

Funny thing about those perfect printing presses, for a while they were in North Korea. Before that China, and the Chinese probably bought them from the USSR. It's almost like they're an urban legend that springs up whenever there's a particular set of dastardly freedom-hating furrin

This is much more than a novelty. It can verify with a high level of certainty that something is an original document (provided you trust the signature database). The uses in the legal profession are innumerable.

Sorry, but this is only really useful in identifying leaks if the leaked document is either A) the original document or B) a high resolution/low contrast scan of the original document. Please note that documents are generally scanned at low resolution and high contrast to aid readability. The high contrast completely blows the background (i.e. the fingerprint) out.

Also, the minute a document is reproduced (fax, copier, laser printer, whatever), the fingerprint is destroyed.

No, I'm afraid you missed the point of this. The point isn't to identify a leak from a scan found in the wild, but rather to identify the origin of a paper that a forensics team would be in possession of, as to prove its authenticity. If you RTFA you would have read that it actually takes four scans of the document rotated by 90 degrees (so the light angle is different) to build that "fingerprint".

"A drug company like Pfizer, for example, could take fingerprints of their labels when they are shipped, and this data could be verified later by a government or company representative in order to spot fakes."

In times people consciously order fake viagra or fake diet pills this might not help.

This won't stop money counterfeiters from creating money. Even if you added some kind of barcode that contained the fingerprint of the paper to every bill, the overhead to scan the bill would make it worthwhile only to large bills, so the counterfeiters stick to small bills. Or they reverse the fingerprint process and print valid barcodes on the bills they counterfeit.

But in terms of tracking objects, it's a great idea. If a document winds up in the wrong hands and the authorities recover it, they could then trace it back to its origins. Take it a step further and apply the concept to other objects. Maybe use xrays on components of a car to help ID stolen parts. Cost of implementation would make this work only with very high-end autos. Maybe something similar for weapons? Serial numbers can be filed down, but changing the unique composition of the metal would require a bit more work.

The best thing is it works with existing items, so you don't have to force people to buy new items for the system to work.

Solution you propose is already sold in Czech. You buy spray can full of microdots (0.4mm) with unique hologram id. Use it on your car parts and you can prove your ownership even if car is disassembled to parts.

This won't stop money counterfeiters from creating money. Even if you added some kind of barcode that contained the fingerprint of the paper to every bill, the overhead to scan the bill would make it worthwhile only to large bills, so the counterfeiters stick to small bills. Or they reverse the fingerprint process and print valid barcodes on the bills they counterfeit.

Surely there's already perfectly good scanners out there for detecting fake currency. It's just that most establishments that handle money (stores, fast food joints, etc.) can't be bothered with the overhead of purchasing thousands of units to deploy with their cash registers, and also don't want to take the efficiency hit of running the money through a scanner (or just having the tiller look at it in UV or whatever) before putting in the till.

HP released a palm-held page scanner that you would wipe across the paper like a squeegee. It would scan the text and assemble the entire page based upon the unique grain pattern in the paper. The market didn't understand the concept, wasn't ready for a briefcase document scanner, whatever the case was, but it failed and was withdrawn from market.

Beyond counterfeiting, there are uses of this technology in criminal investigations.

Say, someone sent a threatening letter to someone and then eventually murdered them.
Later, the murderer denies having written that letter.
The paper on which the threatening letter was written could be tied to the paper in the murderer's home using this kind of fingerprinting.

Of course, the courts in general have to be convinced of the uniqueness of this fingerprint before this could be used.

This is not news, the university of applied sciences in Mannheim worked on this several years ago, and it is already implemented in their diplomas. Interestingly they discovered it as a side effect, while trying to cramp more data on a sheet of paper.

I'm currently developing a Java fingerprinting library ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfooid/ [sourceforge.net] ) and it's learned me if you want to fingerprint something, it needs a certain unique continuity. Fingerprints have that in their unique curves. Audio has it in the sound wave but I don't see how a piece of paper has that, let alone be able to distinguish a copy from an original.

The more I think about this less than astonishing breakthrough, the less sense it makes to me. It seems to me that, as described, the technique is useful only in proving that a piece of paper is identical to itself. Unless you're fascinated by tautologies, this is not exactly exciting; furthermore, none of the uses cited in the article seem plausible.

For example, how could this technique be used to detect counterfeit currency? As everyone who has ever thought of combining a 20 dollar bill and a Xerox machine knows, just copying the bill doesn't produce a convincing fake, because the mint uses special paper to print currency. Is the author of this article suggesting that we scan every bill that's printed, file the scans by serial number, then scan every bill that's spent, and compare the scan against the database? Even comparing only suspect bills seems impractical to me—besides, if the counterfeit is that good, not even the government wants to know.

The pharmaceutical label verification is equally ludicrous. Remember, you'd have to authenticate each particular label against the database to verify it. This is nuts. You don't just rely on the label to authenticate lab-grade products—you rely on procedures that include traces, accountability, and a documented chain of custody. If we're talking aspirin, then the cost would be ludicrously out of proportion to the gain. If we're really worried, say if we're dealing with plutonium or something, then we're not going to rely on a silly label for authentication. How do we know the label isn't real, and the stuff in the container was stolen in transit, and something else substituted?

Could we imagine a case where it would make sense to use this scanning method to verify the authenticity of a document? Say we have a very, very, important document. We want to make sure it doesn't get swapped out for a fake document that looks just like it? Aside from the question of why it would matter, I'd have to ask: which is more vulnerable to malicious tampering—a paper document or a database record?

There might be applications to this technology, but if so, the article isn't telling us.

Even my cheap £40 scanner will not scan money. I thought it was clever when it automatically diplayed an anti-counterfeiting website after I tried. Any angle, even folded in half would display the page. Storing images of all paper money is probably why the drivers were so big...

I don't see how it helps crack down on forgery at all. It only enables you to identify a piece of paper you have previously had access to in order to scan its fibres. Then, if you encounter the same physical piece of paper again, you can repeat the scan (which takes several passes using the otherwise conventional over-the-counter scanner).

It DOES enable you to identify a leaked document, if it comes back into your hands, but I don't see why you'd opt for paper fibre scanning over some other sort of hidde

The article does not clarify how exact they are.
For example, there is a huge difference between only being able to identify that page A is still the original page A and being able to say that unknown page A came from Batch 12043, which according to our records was produced by X corporation, on Y Date, and sold to Z retailer on date W, using UPC code 90827452345 through 90827452356
Which they can do can dramatically alter the usefulness of the technology. I would be very surprised if they could do both.

RTFA, It reads texture, not color. The alignment of the fibers isn't changed by cofee. If I dye my thumb purple, my thumbprint is still my thumbprint. Now if you spilled coffee on it, and firmly rubbed it firmly with your palm, it might change a bit, but even then, it could calulate the area that is common with the original. any two random sheets of paper, even produced from the same paper-mill would have a value pretty darn close to zero. Anything slightly higher than that suggests a match.

(Arrg, Slashdot seems to have eaten my first attempt at this comment)
A decent silicone mold of a sheet of paper would be able to pick up a sufficient level of detail as to reproduce something (like a resin cast) that could fool the scanner. A bit of experimentation could produce a substance with the physical properties of paper that could fool it...I'm thinking along the lines of a finer grained pulp with some stronger binding agents.

It would take some cleverness and home-brew spirit to work out the tec